Someone told me I was "so good at starting things" when I was about nineteen and I think it genuinely set me back two years. Not because it was mean. Because it was true and I took it as a compliment when it was actually a description of a problem.
The compliment that makes you worse is a specific genre. It's the praise that locks you into a version of yourself that you should be growing out of. It feels good in the moment — someone sees you, someone appreciates something about you — and then it becomes a cage.
"You're so creative." "You're such a free spirit." "You're so good at thinking outside the box." These sound like compliments. They are compliments. They're also, sometimes, ways of saying: you're good at the fun part and not so good at the hard part, and I'm going to frame that as a positive so we don't have to talk about it.
I've been thinking about this because I've been watching younger people I know receive praise and I can see, sometimes, when the praise is going to hurt them. When it's going to calcify something that should stay fluid. When it's going to make them think they've arrived somewhere when they've actually just started.
The Girl Next Up thing is about growth, and growth requires a certain amount of discomfort with where you are. The compliment that makes you worse is the one that makes you comfortable with where you are before you should be.
There's a version of this in community and culture — the way communities can reinforce certain identities in ways that make it hard to change. If everyone knows you as the creative one, becoming the disciplined one feels like a betrayal. The compliment becomes a social contract.
The antidote, I think, is to be suspicious of praise that describes who you are rather than what you did. "That was a great idea" is useful feedback. "You're such a creative person" is a label. Labels are comfortable. Comfort is the enemy of growth, at least at certain stages.
I'm not saying don't accept compliments. I'm saying notice which ones are about a thing you did and which ones are about a thing you are. The ones about what you are — be careful with those. They're trying to tell you something, and it might not be what you think.
The youth and ambition conversation is full of this. Young people are praised for potential constantly. Potential is not an achievement. At some point you have to stop being someone with potential and start being someone who did something. The compliment that keeps you in the potential stage is the one that makes you worse.
Someone told me I was good at starting things. I should have said: I know. What do I do about that? Instead I said thank you and kept starting things. josephcalitoy.com has some thoughts on this — the difference between being seen and being understood. Being seen felt good. Being understood would have been more useful.